News

June 22, 2009

Silver Standard Is Evolving From A Pure Play Silver Company Into A Much Broader Precious Metals Story

By Rob Davies

A resource base of over 1,700 million ounces of silver has a gross in-situ valuation of US$25,000 million. That is what Silver Standard has to its name, and the market correspondingly values the company at US$1,400 million, or 82 cents an ounce. As a way of playing silver there can surely be few better or cheaper ways. But it gets better than that because the company is rapidly adding lots of gold to its resource base as well – gold from the Snowfield property in British Columbia. At the last count this property had four million ounces in indicated resource and another 14 million in the inferred category. In gross value that is another US$17,000 million. Combine the two resources and ownership of Silver Standard gives a claim to over US$42,000 million worth of precious metals up and down the Americas.

At this stage it is only fair to point out that only 195 million of those silver ounces are in the proven and probable categories, and that none of these ounces will be extracted and sold for some months yet.  Worse, the bulk of those silver ounces are in Argentina, a country that has had a rather capricious attitude to capitalism in recent years. Minesite put that observation to Robert Quartermain, president and chief executive officer. He was unfazed, and replied that the important level...